Enhancing traffic capacity of scale-free networks by employing hybrid routing strategy

•Hybrid routing strategy includes the shortest path and global dynamic routing.•Packets are sent along the shortest paths or with dynamic source routing information.•The global dynamic source routing strategy is employed as a supplementary routing.•The traffic capacity is remarkably enhanced with a little average path lengthening.

Based on the consideration of easy implementation of new routing strategies on many real complex networks such as the Internet, we propose a hybrid routing mechanism composed of the shortest path routing and the global dynamic routing strategy to improve the network traffic capacity. Under the background of current routing policy and network structure, packets can be sent along the shortest paths or by using source routing information. In this work, a global dynamic source routing strategy is employed as a supplementary routing mechanism to bypass central nodes and increase the delivery capacity utilization of all nodes significantly in the network. The traffic capacity of networked complex systems can be enhanced tens of times at the cost of a little average path lengthening. This hybrid routing method is very useful to network service providers and can be constitutionally supported on several networked complex systems such as the Internet and wireless ad hoc networks.